In recent years, many large circulation periodicals have appeared which require rapid handling of portions of the periodicals consisting of signatures which are gathered for binding, trimmed, bundled for minimum shipping costs, and shipped. A typical operation utilizes a multitude of inserter pockets, each of which receives signatures seriatim from a signature supply means and causes the signatures to be positioned on a binding line, whether of the saddlewire type or a patent bound line, which runs in front of the inserter pockets and carries the complete collection of gathered signatures to a location for further processing to complete the binding process. Moreover, because of the need for highly efficient plant operations, there has been a constant effort to increase the speed at which machines operate which has required the development of new techniques for handling the signatures at all stages of the binding process.
In addition to high speed operation, it will be appreciated that any apparatus necessarily has to be compatible with the limit on the space that is available in a binding line facility. In development of the present invention, it was established as a goal for the signature feeding apparatus to address the concerns in terms of ergonomic problems such as carpel tunnel syndrome and the like. This was successfully addressed in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,114,129 of Chang et al. which issued on May 19, 1992 for: "Signature Feeding Apparatus" and which was directed to saddlewire binding lines. In the case of the present invention, it was recognized as important to also be able to rotate a signature stream from a first up position to a first down position while hopefully at the same time increasing capacity for stacked signatures within the same or a similar amount of floor space as conventional inserter pockets in a manner accommodating signatures in a variety of different widths. Still additionally, it was also important for any such apparatus was to be capable of operation at high speed so as to fully satisfy the demand for such a device for patent bound binding lines.
The present invention is thus directed to overcoming the foregoing problems and achieving the resulting objects as established by the development of the unique signature feeding apparatus described herein.